Talk:Essay on a form of wit: Difference between revisions
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ye gods, I could bang on about this sort of thing for, oh, 160,000 words... | ye gods, I could bang on about this sort of thing for, oh, 160,000 words... | ||
:Remember that Quirm has long been a client state of Ankh-Morpork and the huge market widdershins beckons...It's like Québec, which may as well produce Mordecai Richler or (gods help us) William Shatner. --[[User:Old Dickens|Old Dickens]] ([[User talk:Old Dickens|talk]]) 03:46, 14 November 2015 (UTC) | |||
Latest revision as of 03:46, 14 November 2015
There is a logical inconsistency here.
Regard the pun
Q:- When is a door not a door?
A:- When it's ajar! (a jar).
Pune was a Quirmian, and unless he was dealing all his life with Morporkian-speakers, would have used Quirmian as his first language. As Roundworld comic writer Miles Kingston[1] pointed out, puns don't translate well. Kingston - who chronicled the rise of the mangled part English, part-French "Franglais" language for humorous magazine Punch before its demise in the 1980's - rendered the joke into "Quirmian" [2] as follows:
Q:- Quand est une porte pas une porte?
R:- Quand elle est entre-baillée! (entre-baillée)
or:
R:- Quand elle est une marmite! (une marmite).
There's none of the "ajar / a jar" confusion here: "entre-baillée", meaning more or less "half-open", has no correspondence to "une marmite" (container for food, or small cooking pot).
ye gods, I could bang on about this sort of thing for, oh, 160,000 words...
- Remember that Quirm has long been a client state of Ankh-Morpork and the huge market widdershins beckons...It's like Québec, which may as well produce Mordecai Richler or (gods help us) William Shatner. --Old Dickens (talk) 03:46, 14 November 2015 (UTC)